This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly

Throughout history, rich and poor countries alike have been lending, borrowing, crashing - and recovering -their way through an extraordinary range of financial crises. Each time, the experts have chimed, "this time is different" - claiming that the old rules of valuation no longer apply and that the new situation bears little similarity to past disasters. This book proves that premise wrong.

Endgame: The End of The Debt Supercycle And How It Changes Everything

Hundreds of books have been written about the financial crisis that engulfed the world after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. But what if the bigger financial crisis is ahead of us, not behind us?As John Mauldin and Jonathan Tepper deftly illustrate in this controversial audio book, the crisis was more than a half-century in the making. The Great Financial Crisis, however, was merely Act I.

The Philosophical Investor: Transforming Wisdom into Wealth

Living in Southern California, Gary Carmell has become very familiar with tectonic shifts: cataclysmic changes in the Earth's crust that cause earthquakes and tsunamis. Carmell has also experienced numerous tectonic shifts in the economic landscape in his nearly 30-year investing career. Correctly anticipating economic trends has allowed his real estate investment and management firm, CWS Capital Partners LLC, to grow from assets of $250 million in the late 1980s to over $3 billion today.

Beat the Crowd: How You Can Out-Invest the Herd by Thinking Differently

<>Beat the Crowd is the real contrarian's guide to investing, with comprehensive explanations of how a true contrarian investor thinks and acts - and why it works more often than not. Best-selling author Ken Fisher breaks down the myths and cuts through the noise to present a clear, unvarnished view of timeless market realities. He also points out the ways in which a contrarian approach to investing will outsmart the herd.

Financial Intelligence: A Manager's Guide to Knowing What the Numbers Really Mean

Since its release in 2006, Financial Intelligence has become a favorite among managers who need a guided tour through the numbers, helping them to understand not only what the numbers really mean but also why they matter. This new, completely updated edition brings the numbers up to date and continues to teach the basics of finance to managers who need to use financial data to drive their business.

Inside the House of Money: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Profiting in the Global Markets

This updated edition of Inside the House of Money lifts the veil on the typically opaque world of hedge funds, offering a rare glimpse at how today's highest paid money managers approach their craft. Now with new commentary, author Steve Drobny takes you even further into the hedge fund industry. He demystifies how these star traders make billions for their well-heeled investors, revealing their theories, strategies and approaches to markets.

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned - and Have Still to Learn - from the Financial Crisis

The Shifts and the Shocks is not another detailed history of the crisis, but the most persuasive and complete account yet published of what the crisis should teach us about modern economies and economics. The audiobook identifies the origin of the crisis in the complex interaction between globalization, hugely destabilizing global imbalances and our dangerously fragile financial system.

The Great Rebalancing: Trade, Conflict, and the Perilous Road Ahead for the World Economy

China's economic growth is sputtering, the Euro is under threat, and the United States is combating serious trade disadvantages. Another Great Depression? Not quite. Noted economist and China expert Michael Pettis argues instead that we are undergoing a critical rebalancing of the world economies.

Fragile by Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit

Analyzing the political and banking history of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil through several centuries, Fragile by Design demonstrates that chronic banking crises and scarce credit are not accidents due to unforeseen circumstances. Rather, these fluctuations result from the complex bargains made between politicians, bankers, bank shareholders, depositors, debtors, and taxpayers.

Code Red: How to Protect Your Savings from the Coming Crisis

Written by the New York Times best-selling author team of John Mauldin and Jonathan Tepper, Code Red spills the beans on the central banks in the U.S., U.K., E.U., and Japan and how they've rigged the game against the average saver and investor. More importantly, it shows you how to protect your hard-earned cash from the bankers' disastrous monetary policies and how to come out a winner in the irresponsible game of chicken they're playing with the global financial system.

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism

The global financial crisis has made it painfully clear that powerful psychological forces are imperiling the wealth of nations today. From blind faith in ever-rising housing prices to plummeting confidence in capital markets, "animal spirits" are driving financial events worldwide.

The Invisible Hands: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Bubbles, Crashes, and Real Money, Revised and Updated

In light of the colossal losses and amidst the resulting confusion that still lingers, it is time to rethink money management in the broadest of terms. Drastic changes need to be made, and managers who actually made money during 2008 make for a logical starting place. The Invisible Hands provides investors and traders with the latest thinking from some of the best and the most successful players in money management, highlighting the specific risk and return objectives of each, and discussing the evolution of certain styles and beliefs in money management.

Markets Never Forget (But People Do): How Your Memory Is Costing You Money and Why This Time Isn't Different

Best-selling author Ken Fisher here explains how investor's memories play (often costly) tricks on them. Fisher takes aim at some major market memory mishaps, like the idea that stocks have become inherently more volatile or that wildly above - or below - average returns are abnormal. He shows how, early in every recovery, investors don’t believe in it - often at a huge cost. And he shows how, in investing, ideology is deadly. Most important, he explains how you can use history as a powerful investing tool.

Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

On January 26, 2009, during the depth of the financial crisis and having just completed five years as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Timothy F. Geithner was sworn in by President Barack Obama as the 75th Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. Now, in a strikingly candid, riveting, and historically illuminating memoir, Geithner takes listeners behind the scenes during the darkest moments of the crisis.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine?

The Panic of 1907: Lessons Learned from the Market's Perfect Storm

In The Panic of 1907, authors Robert Bruner and Sean Carr offer an alternate perspective through a detailed narrative of one of the worst crises in modern financial history - one which ultimately transformed the American financial system and resulted in the establishment of the modern Federal Reserve.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories.

When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

When Genius Failed is the cautionary financial tale of our time, the gripping saga of what happened when an elite group of investors believed they could actually deconstruct risk and use virtually limitless leverage to create limitless wealth. In Roger Lowenstein's hands, it is a brilliant tale peppered with fast money, vivid characters, and high drama.

The Coming Bond Market Collapse: How to Survive the Demise of the U.S. Debt Market

A book that is certain to spark controversy within the financial media and throughout the halls of government, The Coming Bond Market Collapse sounds a clarion call to investors, business leaders, and policymakers. Author Michael Pento, a noted adherent of the Austrian school of economics theories, compellingly argues that the United States is fast approaching the end stage of the biggest asset bubble in history.

Donald P. Williams says:"Nothing new, just a regurgitation of many others"

Publisher's Summary

Throughout history, rich and poor countries alike have been lending, borrowing, crashing - and recovering - their way through an extraordinary range of financial crises. Each time, the experts have chimed, "this time is different" - claiming that the old rules of valuation no longer apply and that the new situation bears little similarity to past disasters. This book proves that premise wrong.

Covering 66 countries across five continents, This Time Is Different presents a comprehensive look at the varieties of financial crises, and guides us through eight astonishing centuries of government defaults, banking panics, and inflationary spikes - from medieval currency debasements to today's subprime catastrophe. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, leading economists whose work has been influential in the policy debate concerning the current financial crisis, provocatively argue that financial combustions are universal rites of passage for emerging and established market nations. The authors draw important lessons from history to show us how much - or how little - we have learned. Using clear, sharp analysis and comprehensive data, Reinhart and Rogoff document that financial fallouts occur in clusters and strike with surprisingly consistent frequency, duration, and ferocity. They examine the patterns of currency crashes, high and hyperinflation, and government defaults on international and domestic debts - as well as the cycles in housing and equity prices, capital flows, unemployment, and government revenues around these crises.

While countries do weather their financial storms, Reinhart and Rogoff prove that short memories make it all too easy for crises to recur. This Time Is Different exposes centuries of financial missteps.

What the Critics Say

"This Time Is Different doesn't simply explain what went wrong in our most recent crisis. This book also provides a roadmap of how things are likely to pan out in the years to come....This Time Is Different is an important addition to the literature of financial history." (Wall Street Journal)

This book has a funny title, This Time is Different, but as you read it, it will become plain why it is appropriate. Because, as the authors argue very effectively, everytime an economy has been on the verge of a bubble, and a precious few prognosticators are calling it, the mass of investors say, "this time is different." Certainly true of the present bubble (or the present aftermath) and of 10s and 100s before.

This book is also approachable for the non-economist (I am an economist) if you skip the chunks that the authors themselves recommend you skip in the early parts. That is harder to do with an audiobook, but it can be done (the audiobook is sectioned).

I gave this book 3 stars not because it is bad, or mediocre, but because the actual book is laden with tables and charts. To do it justice I found it necessary to listen to it and look at the book every once in awhile to see the figures (it helped that my employer's research library had a copy). When the narrator, who is good, tries to relate what is in the tables and charts, things get ponderous.

I highly recommend the book. The audiobook is a good complement to it, or vice versa. The audiobook alone is what gets the 3 stars.

What a great book - really puts a lot of tendencies in the economics of the day into a historical perspective. In this respect, it really clears a lot of fog and makes many things clear. However, this book has a very large amount of diagrams and charts which not only illustrate the text, but develop its ideas in a graphical form. Without these graphs the book sounds weird with constant referrals to the stuff you can not see. More so, parts of text - historical anecdotal chunks of data - are simply omitted... So, before spending your credits, find an e-book somewhere on the net - without this aid you are only getting 50% of this book, which is a pity, as this book, being a quite serious research, is, at the same time, is instantly accessible even to a humble armchair economist like myself.

I had to buy this book from Amazon because I tried listening to it and it's nearly impossible. There are references to charts and formulas that are referred to constantly, not just once in a while. This is an important book and very accessible to the modern lay reader, but not a good book in Audible format.

The print version of this book would make for an excellent text for future MBA candidates. Unfortunately, it makes for a poor audiobook for the rest of us.
This work is highly admirable for its scope and rigor. However it's far too pedantic and lacking in narrative to accommodate the audio format.
In fact, it might be too pedantic and lacking in narrative for any non-academic setting.
I say that well aware of the fact that some bookish folk will find that the post-doctoral feel suits them. Be that as it may, the extreme over-reliance on tables disqualifies this work as an audiobook, I think most everybody will agree.

As I listened to a narrator say the words "On table..." or, "In graph...," again, I knew I had selected the wrong book. The authors freely admit that they have avoided a narrative approach as to why economies of small and large scale fall into the same boom and bust cycles. Instead they have relied upon a visual approach, using tables and graphs for the presentation of their arguments and analysis.

While the premise of the tome is intriguing, without a hard copy or e-book of the original text, this is a poor translation to the aural format.

This material is 5-star excellent with good narration, but you should buy the physical book as there are many references to charts and tables, so the format gets 2 stars. I listen to audiobooks during my daily commute, so I did not get to see the material referenced.

The content of the book is great with its long historical view on souvereign debt defaults. After hearing the audiobook it is clear to me that the current developments in Greece etc are not a unique events.

I agree with previous reviews that the audiobook format was very bad. The references to tables and charts gets the listener out of track. Audible and/or the authors should have edited the text before making it into an audiobook.
Therefore:
Grade for content: 5 stars
Grade for format: 0 (zero) stars
All in all: 2 stars

Be warned: this is a good book but very clearly an academic text not intended for the general reader. I get the feeling that the publishers may have rushed this out to cash in on all the post financial crisis books. It is a shame as it has a really interesting story to tell and would have benefited from a different edition - indeed book - aimed at the general reader with far less emphasis on data and statistics. (Underemployed journalists take note!). Another problem is that the book relies on sets of charts and data that can't be read out loud as they would be a nonsense. I do think the audible / publishers need to think about this a bit more, perhaps at least provide a PDF to download of the charts maybe?

However it is a good book and if I were reading the paper version it would have got a better rating!

4 of 4 people found this review helpful

Judy Corstjens

5/5/12

Overall

"This is not an audiobook"

If you compare table 1.2a with 1.2b you will see that the period spent in crisis by developing countries after a sovereign default is comparable to... on the other hand, if you want an audiobook that whiles away the hours of gardening you probably want something more like Malcolm Gladwell.

3 of 3 people found this review helpful

Gøril

Oslo, Norway

2/13/13

Overall

"A great Economics book, unfortunately without data"

Tis is a really interesting, in-depth study of financial, currency and debt crises. It is possible to follow the content in an audiobook, but it is unfortunate that one can only imagine the graphs and tables that are referred to. Would it not be possible to download these as PDFs together with the audiobook?

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

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